Right. I think all these studies that show that show activities with emotional response X cause the corresponding neurotransmitters to flow are sort of pointless; if they didn't flow, there would be no emotional response. Mainly the findings would seem surprising to somebody who assumes emotions have no grounding in biology, i.e. they are magical. Although, I can see some value in proving you can objectively measure something that was previously subjective, or in pinning down the specific biological trigger in cases where several different ones were plausible.
There's been some other minor improvements of course: much better avionics (which isn't something that GE does to my knowledge), electronic engine controls (which GE does do), etc.
Actually it is about avionics:
G.E.'s new joint venture in Shanghai will focus on avionics -- the electronics for communications, navigation, cockpit displays and controls. G.E. will be contributing its leading-edge avionics technology -- a high-performance core computer system that operates as the avionics brain of Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner.
China has become very well known for making deals to get modern and/or cutting edge technology without having to do the R&D. That is a boon for American companies for short term profits.
Except China is doing R&D, and the agreement isn't short-term:
"a person involved in the talks said the 50-50 venture is for 50 years. G.E., the person said, is putting in technology and start-up capital of $200 million. Avic will initially contribute $700 million, the person said, including the cost of a new research and development lab already under construction."
The problem is all the banks are interdependent. They loan lots of money to each other, and the failure of a few banks causes a run on the rest causing them to fail even if they were fairly sound. So, breaking one big bank into smaller similar banks wouldn't change much.
That's why I think subdividing them along functional lines would be more effective. That way people who just want a safe place to put money have it, and the gamblers can be hung out to dry.
The problem is the banks have the rest of the nation by the balls. Letting them die would have started a depression. Banks are annoying, but circulating money is the lifeblood of the economy. I support (re-) separating banking from speculative investment to end the situation. I realize the two aren't entirely separable, but they could be (and used to be) much more separate than they are now.
So sure, back when signalling channels were mostly empty, people thought "why not put text messages on them". They now rue their decision and text messages' massive popularity overwhelms a signalling channel not really designed for them.
There's no reason the messages in my hypothetical service would have to be true SMS messages. I think making SMS separate from email (in the manner you described) is just a holdover from the early days when cell networks were designed mainly to carry voice. It seems the obvious solution is to start using the data channel now and give people real email, with a suitably streamlined UI to make it similar to SMS.
Man this is great! Now I only need one table and never have to JOIN again. Most of the rows won't use most of the columns but that's what NULL is for, am I right?
I'm truly surprised nobody has launched an ad-supported (they would call it "free") texting-only service. Probably the most expensive-per-byte plan out there is AT&T's $15/mo plan which has only 200 MB/mo. But assuming a text averages 200 bytes, that would be 1,000,000 texts. So if an ad-supported user sent 1000 texts per month, you'd only have to collect 1.5 cents from advertisers to recoup bandwidth at the same price per byte. Somewhat more if you wanted to subsidize the cost of the phone. But you would also make money by charging by the minute for voice calls.
I realize all the excitement right now is around high-end phones that do everything, but I'm going to have 4 teenagers over the next 10 years and would like a barebones way to let them all have a phone (or at least texting) without paying monthly fees. For that matter I would toss my tracfone for that because I only average a couple calls and a handful of texts per month.
And the American expert in nuclear intelligence, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Israelis used machines of the P-1 style to test the effectiveness of Stuxnet.
The expert added that Israel worked in collaboration with the United States in targeting Iran, but that Washington was eager for "plausible deniability."
How much more direct could a confirmation be? The only question is the veracity of the anonymous source.
Yes, but not everyone is in the US or another amazon-mp3-enabled country.
A couple people pointed that out. I'm a little surprised, since it seems like cellphones and Internet access are a ripoff in the US compared to other places.
Another difference is, I suspect the piracy police may be more potent here in the US since it's a big market and a lot of content is produced here.
I doubt you can find any movie you'd want streamed for $1 (netflix doesn't have porn!), but even if you could streaming sucks.
True, new recent movies are often $3-$4, and $4 is too much IMHO.
However, streaming does not suck. I think the standard quality on amazon or netflix is right on par with a DVD, and the HD stream is better than that. (Granted, neither is as good as digital broadcast TV, and Blu-Ray must take the cake, but I've never watched one). With downloads the quality is uneven; usually it's good, but sometimes you wait a long time for a download and it's really crappy.
Or, as somebody once put it somewhat more artfully:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
...only there's not as much left to take as there was then. All the land and water is owned and fenced off and the rapid growth is done. Let them come and help prop up the market for $400/sf real estate in California and Arizona.
Are people still paying for warez sites? It seems to me the music and video content producers are waving the white flag by offering their goods for reasonable prices.
Music: I am not old, but when I was a kid, an audiocasette was $12-$14 at the store, and minimum wage was $3.35. You could work half a day (4 hours) to buy one album. Now I am getting mp3 albums from amazon for $5-$7 each, and minimum wage is $7.25 (1 hour). (My own viewpoint is probably skewed further because I actually was earning minimum wage then, and naturally make more now). And usually a few tracks of any album can be found for free on youtube.
Video: Most movies can be streamed legally for $1-$3, and that's if they're not already available through netflix $8/mo unlimited streaming plan. Even paid piracy sites used to cost more than that. Is it even worth two hours of my time to watch if it's not worth $1 to me? I don't feel the slightest incentive to shell out for a Blu-Ray player and their $20 discs.
Granted, piracy is probably to thank for putting price pressure on the content cartels. And net neutrality is just as important for 3rd party legal streaming as illegal downloading, since from the ISPs perspective they're exactly the same. But anyways, this story made me think how things have got quite a bit better in the last few years.
Now our military has more stuff, we might be able to stand a chance against another military for the first time in a long time!
Well, read the article... there is no claim of increasing lethality here, it is all about sustainability:
"Converting a fixed point-to-point cable infrastructure of tactical aircraft to a reconfigurable fiber-optic network that remains for the life of the air frame has the potential to save the Defense Department billions of dollars over the lifecycle of an aircraft fleet," said Adel Saleh, DARPA program manager in a statement.
The agency said modern military aircraft typically feature miles of heavily shielded copper wire cables that connect a multitude of components. "This cabling is heavy and subject to deterioration due to harsh environmental conditions encountered in normal flight operations. In addition, cables needed for carrying analog radio frequency signals are expensive, fragile and difficult to install and replace.
I think this is a good direction for us to take. We need to think about how to maintain our military strength as much as possible while diverting more of our resources to today's battlefield - the global economy (by which I really just mean cutting government expenses to reduce the tax/inflation burden).
The US and China aren't going to be invading each other for a fight to the death any time soon. At minimum, there would be many decades of proxy wars in outlying areas first, and as yet there's no real reason to think even those will occur.
I spent a couple minutes looking for the paper on difficult fonts that started this to see if the measured reading time, but I didn't find the paper.
(I'm sure the journal paper is behind a paywall but often authors leak a near-final prepress as a courtesy to increase readership of their work.)
Exactly. Slashdotters writing in would change nothing precisely because government IS representative of the common man.
If Obama were to veto the Patriot act, he would be eviscerated by scare-mongering issue ads for the next election, and they would work - and that's even IF the US doesn't happen to suffer another terrorist attack by then.
The problem is, Obama hasn't the smaller steps that are necessary to de-escalate the level of public hysteria in preparation for repealing Patriot. For example, closing Gitmo and moving the prisoners there to prisons here in the US, and then waiting a while for all the uproar to die down and for everybody to see these are not supervillians like Magneto from X-Men.
Although again, that's not what the public wants him to do. They want him to focus exclusively on "fixing" the economy. That is what the common man wants, whether or not it is really within the President's responsibilities or powers.
It would take some actual evidence to convince me anybody did this knowingly. Your assumption of, "oh well, it's our last batch, I don't care if the shuttle blows up" doesn't sound very likely to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. I think all these studies that show that show activities with emotional response X cause the corresponding neurotransmitters to flow are sort of pointless; if they didn't flow, there would be no emotional response. Mainly the findings would seem surprising to somebody who assumes emotions have no grounding in biology, i.e. they are magical. Although, I can see some value in proving you can objectively measure something that was previously subjective, or in pinning down the specific biological trigger in cases where several different ones were plausible.
Actually it is about avionics:
Except China is doing R&D, and the agreement isn't short-term:
That's why I think subdividing them along functional lines would be more effective. That way people who just want a safe place to put money have it, and the gamblers can be hung out to dry.
The problem is the banks have the rest of the nation by the balls. Letting them die would have started a depression. Banks are annoying, but circulating money is the lifeblood of the economy. I support (re-) separating banking from speculative investment to end the situation. I realize the two aren't entirely separable, but they could be (and used to be) much more separate than they are now.
There's no reason the messages in my hypothetical service would have to be true SMS messages. I think making SMS separate from email (in the manner you described) is just a holdover from the early days when cell networks were designed mainly to carry voice. It seems the obvious solution is to start using the data channel now and give people real email, with a suitably streamlined UI to make it similar to SMS.
Man this is great! Now I only need one table and never have to JOIN again. Most of the rows won't use most of the columns but that's what NULL is for, am I right?
I realize all the excitement right now is around high-end phones that do everything, but I'm going to have 4 teenagers over the next 10 years and would like a barebones way to let them all have a phone (or at least texting) without paying monthly fees. For that matter I would toss my tracfone for that because I only average a couple calls and a handful of texts per month.
How much more direct could a confirmation be? The only question is the veracity of the anonymous source.
Naw, she's too busy running for President and taping her reality show.
I dust off wine every few years just to see if it'll work any better for me this time and it always ends in disappointment. I am not a fan of it.
Now, now, lots of Nations are former enemies, and most have been Allies before or since too :)
A couple people pointed that out. I'm a little surprised, since it seems like cellphones and Internet access are a ripoff in the US compared to other places.
Another difference is, I suspect the piracy police may be more potent here in the US since it's a big market and a lot of content is produced here.
I'm pretty cheap too, but run Linux, so there's no software to pirate :)
True, new recent movies are often $3-$4, and $4 is too much IMHO.
However, streaming does not suck. I think the standard quality on amazon or netflix is right on par with a DVD, and the HD stream is better than that. (Granted, neither is as good as digital broadcast TV, and Blu-Ray must take the cake, but I've never watched one). With downloads the quality is uneven; usually it's good, but sometimes you wait a long time for a download and it's really crappy.
Music: I am not old, but when I was a kid, an audiocasette was $12-$14 at the store, and minimum wage was $3.35. You could work half a day (4 hours) to buy one album. Now I am getting mp3 albums from amazon for $5-$7 each, and minimum wage is $7.25 (1 hour). (My own viewpoint is probably skewed further because I actually was earning minimum wage then, and naturally make more now). And usually a few tracks of any album can be found for free on youtube.
Video: Most movies can be streamed legally for $1-$3, and that's if they're not already available through netflix $8/mo unlimited streaming plan. Even paid piracy sites used to cost more than that. Is it even worth two hours of my time to watch if it's not worth $1 to me? I don't feel the slightest incentive to shell out for a Blu-Ray player and their $20 discs.
Granted, piracy is probably to thank for putting price pressure on the content cartels. And net neutrality is just as important for 3rd party legal streaming as illegal downloading, since from the ISPs perspective they're exactly the same. But anyways, this story made me think how things have got quite a bit better in the last few years.
Well, read the article... there is no claim of increasing lethality here, it is all about sustainability:
I think this is a good direction for us to take. We need to think about how to maintain our military strength as much as possible while diverting more of our resources to today's battlefield - the global economy (by which I really just mean cutting government expenses to reduce the tax/inflation burden).
The US and China aren't going to be invading each other for a fight to the death any time soon. At minimum, there would be many decades of proxy wars in outlying areas first, and as yet there's no real reason to think even those will occur.
The BBC article says everybody got 90 seconds to study the text, so my guess about people taking longer to read in a poor font doesn't explain it.
I spent a couple minutes looking for the paper on difficult fonts that started this to see if the measured reading time, but I didn't find the paper. (I'm sure the journal paper is behind a paywall but often authors leak a near-final prepress as a courtesy to increase readership of their work.)
Perhaps the illegible font simply slows down your reading causing you to absorb more because you spent more time on it.
I'm sure you knew that, but it certainly bears mention as he was the only senator to vote against Patriot in the first place.
If Obama were to veto the Patriot act, he would be eviscerated by scare-mongering issue ads for the next election, and they would work - and that's even IF the US doesn't happen to suffer another terrorist attack by then.
The problem is, Obama hasn't the smaller steps that are necessary to de-escalate the level of public hysteria in preparation for repealing Patriot. For example, closing Gitmo and moving the prisoners there to prisons here in the US, and then waiting a while for all the uproar to die down and for everybody to see these are not supervillians like Magneto from X-Men.
Although again, that's not what the public wants him to do. They want him to focus exclusively on "fixing" the economy. That is what the common man wants, whether or not it is really within the President's responsibilities or powers.
It would take some actual evidence to convince me anybody did this knowingly. Your assumption of, "oh well, it's our last batch, I don't care if the shuttle blows up" doesn't sound very likely to me.